The Proto-Liver Origin of Life: A Regulation-First Model of Prebiotic Redox Homeostasis and the Emergence of Metabolic Order

A central challenge in understanding the origin of life is explaining how early reaction networks remained stable long enough for metabolic organization, chirality, and heredity to emerge. Existing metabolism-first and replication-first models implicitly require homeostasis but do not identify its prebiotic source. Here, we develop a Regulation-First framework in which life originates from a geochemically rooted proto-liver—a non-biological redox-buffering system capable of stabilizing energy flow within mineral microstructures. The proto-liver is defined as a self-regulating, dissipative redox network that maintains gradients, resists perturbation, and persists across environmental cycles.

Within this regulated environment, directional electron flow acts as a natural symmetry-breaking driver, enabling mineral-templated reactions to produce and amplify enantioselective outcomes. In this view, biological homochirality emerges not as an isolated puzzle but as a secondary consequence of regulated, asymmetric redox cycling.

We further show that the transition from mineral surfaces to porphyrin and heme chemistry preserves the same regulatory logic: metal-centered redox buffering, stabilized electron flow, and protection against runaway oxidation. Modern hemoproteins thus represent molecular descendants of early proto-liver systems, supporting a continuous evolutionary trajectory from prebiotic redox control to cellular metabolism.

This model reframes life’s origin as the moment when regulation became continuous—establishing an unbroken lineage of homeostatic energy dissipation that later incorporated metabolic networks, genetic inheritance, and complex cellular organization.